Let Me Open You a Swan [Paperback]

Deborah Bogen (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1932418369 | ISBN-13: 978-1932418361 | Publication Date: March 1, 2010

Winner of the 2009 Antivenom Poetry Award from Elixir Press.

Let Me Open You a Swan, chosen as Antivenom Prize winner by Michelle Mitchell-Foust, is the second full-length collection for poet Deborah Bogen whose previous works have been selected as prize winners by Edward Hirsch and Betty Adcock.  Poems from this volume have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Margie, New Letters, Ploughshares, Sentence and other journals and have been featured on both Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. This year Bogen was among the twenty poets whose work was chosen as Best of the Net by Patricia Smith.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Let Me Open You a Swan brims with intellect and artistry. In "The Migraine's Art" she writes "harried by heaven's hurt.../the fox is out and bells are tolling fire/or priests,/their knuckles a nick in my skull." --Lynn Emanuel

Deborah Bogen...sees clearly into the past with a fierce imagination that brings forward the body's cargo...her endings turn us both inward and outward.. --Christopher Buckley

What we have in Deborah Bogen's Let Me Open You a Swan is sublime poetry, the rare gift of a terrifying look into the shaping of a warrior poet and her work. --Michelle MItchell-Foust

About the Author

Deborah Bogen's poems and reviews appear widely. Her first full-length collection, Landscape with Silos, won the 2005 XJ Kennedy Poetry Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2006. Recent poetry can be found in Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Field, Margie, and Poetry International. Her chapbook, Living by the Children's Cemetery, was selected by Edward Hirsch as winner of the 2002 ByLine Press Chapbook Competition. She now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she runs free fiction and poetry workshops. Bogen's latest collection, LET ME OPEN YOU A SWAN (Elixir Press, 2010), won the Antivenom Prize judged by Michelle Mitchell-Foust.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Elixir Press (March 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932418369
• ISBN-13: 978-1932418361
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,049,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deborah Bogen was born in Montana, but spent a good deal of time in Garrison, North Dakota as a child. These visits to grandparents and cousins provided a landscape that continues to shape Bogen's work.

In 1968 Bogen was 18, living across the Bay from San Francisco at a time when Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder were reading constantly, and when every street corner and coffee house provided a venue for poets. By 1970 she was briefly at Oberlin College, where she wrote with Stuart Friebert and David Young, but when the Kent State Massacred occurred she marched on Washington and then left college to marry a hippie and live in Bolinas, California where her intention was to raise hippie babies and green chard.

Life intervened - the need for money to raise those kids turned her into a paralegal. After the hippie marriage ended she was surprised and enchanted when she re-met her college professor teacher, Jim Bogen. They married and finished raising their joint daughters, making music, art and generally good intellectual fun in Claremont, California where Bogen began to write poetry in earnest at the ripe old age of 47 (with the terrific poet, Doug Anderson, see, The Moon Reflected Fire.) Her first chapbook was chosen by Edward Hirsch as winner of the 2002 Byline Chapbook Contest. Her first full-length collection, "Landscape with Silos", won the 2005 X J Kennedy Poetry Prize and her recent collection "Let Me Open You a Swan" won the 2009 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. Today she and her husband live, write and teach in Pittsburgh, PA. You can connect with Bogen at her website www.DeborahBogen.net.